There Will Be a Forest-City!

China has announced ambitious plans to build up the country forest cities that will fight air pollution. The first Forest City designed by renowned Italian architect Stefano Boeri is planned for Liuzhou, home to around 1.5 million residents in the southern province of Guangxi. Boeri has high hopes to build the second Forest City in Shijiazhuang, a northern city in Hebei province that ranks among China’s worst for air quality. Scaling up from his tree-clad Bosco Verticale skyscraper, Boeri created a blueprint for new cities in China that will be blanketed in greenery to fight air pollution.

Forest City masterplans are envisioned as models of sustainable growth in China, a country choked with smog and undergoing rapid urbanization as 14 million of farmers migrate to cities every year. “We have been asked to design an entire city where you don’t only have one tall building but you have 100 or 200 buildings of different sizes, all with trees and plants on the facades,” Boeri told the Guardian. “We are working very seriously on designing all the different buildings. I think they will start to build at the end of this year. By 2020 we could imagine having the first forest city in China.”

The Forest City was created as a scalable development following a petal formation. Each petal, which caters to a population of 20,000, can be scaled to include five petals in a single region, forming a flower-like formation centered on communal green space. All buildings would be covered in trees and greenery to help suck tons of carbon out of the atmosphere, pump oxygen into the air, and provide soothing habitat to both humans and native fauna.

Just one forest building will suck an estimated total of 25 tons of carbon dioxide a year, so the entire city is expected to make a significant contribution to the reduction of air pollution that is troubling not only the country but the region as a whole.